Friday, October 3, 2008

As Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. puzzles out the perfect tone to take with Gov. Sarah Palin in Thursday night’s debate, he is getting advice from a woman who has been an intimate since he was a grade school student with a stutter and a paper route.

“He’s been my best friend all my life,” said that person, Mr. Biden’s sister, Valerie Biden Owens, in an interview in August. “I opened my eyes and he was there and he said, ‘Let’s go.’ I was his sidekick.”

She has managed every one of his campaigns, from high school class president to his New Castle County Council race to his first Senate bid, a 1972 upset victory, to his minefield of a presidential run in 1988.

The tightly controlled Obama operation has been the first time she has had no official position on her brother’s campaigns. That does not mean, however, that she is sitting this one out.

“She is absolutely his political alter-ego and confidante,” said David Wade, Mr. Biden’s press secretary. “She talks with the campaign every day.”

Their talks include advice on how Mr. Biden should handle himself during Thursday night’s debate, a showdown where many will be watching whether Mr. Biden can temper his oversized personality so he does not appear to be overpowering his female opponent. It was Mrs. Biden Owens who endorsed the plan to have him practice with Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm of Michigan, another dynamic female governor with a quick take.

As Mr. Biden has written in his autobiography, his trust in his sister is complete.

Mrs. Biden Owens, like Bay Buchanan before her, could be part of a small group called Sister Strategists. (Bay is the sister of Patrick J. Buchanan, who ran for president in 1992, 1996 and 2000.)

Mrs. Biden Owens said her family — along with Mr. Biden, there are two other brothers — does not know how to do it any other way. “It’s just how we grew up,” she said.

Having his family closely involved with his life has worked both politically and personally for Mr. Biden.

Claire DeMatteis, who worked as Mr. Biden’s senior counsel for 10 years, said of Mrs. Biden Owens, “I wouldn’t call it weakness, but when people criticize Senator Biden, she takes it understandably very personally.”

When he was hit with charges of plagiarism in his 1988 run, it was “just terrible” for his sister, Mr. Kaufman said. “Senator Biden’s career has been an incredible roller coaster, and that makes it even harder.”

Mrs. Biden Owens was reminded of that flame-out in August, while sitting in a Denver hotel room a few hours before her brother made his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention.

“You make a mistake and you pay for it,” she said. “He paid for it. When we left the presidential campaign in ’88, he turned and walked down the corridor of the Senate and he sat down and chaired the Bork confirmation.” She paused and looked off, as if she could still see him walking down that long hall.

Shortly after, there was the aneurism that almost killed him. Mrs. Biden Owens noted the positive side: Had he stayed in the race, he very well might be dead.

“Oh, if we had continued,” she said, “and if he had told me three months down the road, right before the Iowa caucuses, that he had a headache and he couldn’t do it that day, I would have said, ‘You don’t know what a headache is.’ ”

After Mr. Biden’s first wife and infant daughter were killed in a car crash in 1972, just after he was first elected to the Senate, his sister quit her teaching job, moved in and cared for his two young sons. “Aunt Val” lived with her brother for four years — through her divorce, remarriage and even the birth of her oldest daughter — before finally moving out.

She is married to Jack Owens, one of Mr. Biden’s closest friends from law school, and they now live only 15 minutes away.

“Valerie Biden was the cornerstone that allowed me to sustain and then rebuild my family,” Mr. Biden wrote in his autobiography, “Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics.”

“It was a gift,” Mrs. Biden Owens said, more lightly, all these years later. “I got to practice on Beau and Hunter before I screwed up my own kids.”

She said that people tried to make what she had done, dropping everything and moving in with her brother, into something heroic, but she insisted it had not been.

Her 91-year-old mother, Jean Finnegan Biden, said it was natural for her daughter. “There’s nothing but family, nothing in the world,” she said. “As they were growing up, they did what she told them to do. She was the only girl.”

When they were children, Mr. Biden was a member of the safety patrol, but he turned in his shiny blue badge rather than report his sister for her bad behavior on the bus one day.

At the University of Delaware, he vetted all of her suitors.

“If there was any guy he knew, I couldn’t go out with him because he knew the son of a gun, and any guy he didn’t know, I couldn’t go out with because he didn’t know the son of the gun,” Mrs. Biden Owens recalled.

After her brother’s 1996 Senate race, Mrs. Biden Owens joined the consulting firm Joe Slade White & Company, marketing candidates in dozens of national races. Her clients include Governor Granholm, as well as Representative Chet Edwards of Texas, who had been discussed as a possible Democratic running mate this year before Mr. Biden was chosen.

These days, she said, her role “is to be the sister of the vice-presidential nominee.”

Thinking ahead to Thursday night, right before her brother takes the stage in St. Louis for the debate, Mrs. Biden Owens said: “I don’t have to tell Joe anything. I’ll just give him a hug and tell him I love him.”